Cattails: Winter Warmth
Cattails in a winter marsh, with a skim of ice on the water. This chilly picture seems to be the very essence of cold. But actually this is an image of potential warmth. You’ve seen cattail seed heads, I’m sure, when they’re just ripe–they look like a brown velvet hot dog impaled on a stick. Just one of those spikes can hold an unbelievable number of seeds–somewhere in the vicinity of a quarter of a million seeds on each stalk. Each individual seed is a tiny dot, almost invisible, attached to a little cluster of fluff, which acts as a parachute so the seeds can...
Read MoreThankful for Milkweed
Where are they? The monarch butterflies—where have they gone? Those big bright orange rainbows that flutter past every fall. Where did they go this year? They didn’t flutter past my house. I saw not one. Did you? What’s happening? I can hardly bear to say, it, but the monarchs are dwindling. Monarch populations hit historic–disastrous–lows this year. There are a lot of reasons for this—pesticides, bad weather, habitat loss. But a big reason is loss of milkweed. Milkweed. It’s the plant that monarchs need. The only plant they lay eggs on, the only plant the caterpillars will feed...
Read MoreDandelion: Up Against the Wall
Dandelions grow anywhere, it seems. That’s almost literally true. Dandelions can sprout in places that seem little short of miraculous, barren habitats where almost any other plant would throw in the towel. They seem to thrive in parking lots, sinking roots into rock-hard soil that’s driven over by cars, parked on by eighteen-wheeler trucks, and scraped and salted in wintertime. The tender green leaves shove their way through gravel and slice through layers of blacktop. Dandelions are found world-wide, spread across the planet on every continent except Antarctica, below sea level...
Read MoreForest Faces
Silver Bay. A quiet bay on the rippling shores of Lake George in the Adirondacks. It’s dead quiet on a misty November afternoon, all but deserted. A perfect place for a writer’s retreat. Perhaps because I’m spending so much time thinking about developing memorable characters–characters with emotional depth, humor, spunk and what-have-you, I’ve taken to seeing characters all around me. Silver Bay isn’t as deserted as I thought–it’s crowded with a remarkable cast of characters. Sometimes it’s easy to pass them by, and then they give you a...
Read MoreA Lesson in Leaves
Hurrying along the sidewalk outside Colonie Center mall on a blustery day. I wasn’t expecting to find a lesson in tree identification spread out on the pavement at my feet. It’s amazing how many ways nature can invent to say “leaf.” All these specimens were blown at random into a corner by the icy wind. There must be a dogwood around here somewhere, because there’s a smooth-edged oval leaf, round and bright as an Easter egg. Next to it is a sharp-edged red oak leaf, brown and crisp as toast. There’s a lot of the familiar five-pointed shape of the maple...
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